The Book of the Heathen

by Robert Edric

  There was nothing I could say. Everything I had hoped not to be told, I had been told in the space of a few minutes and at my own insistence. He had come to talk about Frere, perhaps to ingratiate himself with me, and instead he had shone that blinding light into the future and showed me everything that lived and did not live there.

  I finished dressing.

  ‘Have you seen Nicholas Frere since my arrival?’ he said. He had told us on the day of his arrival that we were not to visit the prisoner until he himself had been to see him.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said. It was a half-lie. Following my approach to the garrison four days previously, I had returned to see Frere and to forewarn him of the man he was about to encounter. But upon asking Bone to let me into Frere’s cell, Frere called out for me to leave and for Bone to keep the door locked. There was nothing I could call in to him in the presence of Bone, who made a point of standing close to me, better there to savour my discomfort at being treated like this by Frere. I insisted to Frere that I needed to talk to him, but he refused even to answer me.

  ‘Nash told me not to let any of you get even this close,’ Bone said. ‘None of you.’ I knew then – this was his purpose in telling me – that I would have to pay him not to report my visit to Nash.

  I looked at Nash now as he considered my answer and wondered if I had given Bone enough.

  He said, ‘Your sergeant…’ But speculatively, and left me uncertain of what Bone had or hadn’t said, what new pattern all these more recent allegiances were forming.

  ‘Proud and noble warrior,’ I said.

  ‘Doubtless employed at a time when these things did not matter. Is he to be trusted?’

  ‘No, but he can be bribed.’

  He looked up at the remark. ‘I sincerely hope not.’

  ‘It’s what you’ve already heard from Abbot,’ I said.

  He lowered his head.

  ‘But he will guard Frere well for you,’ I said. ‘And that’s all that matters.’

  ‘I sense some antagonism between the two men.’

  ‘Enough for Bone to take some pride in his role as gaoler.’

  ‘I see. Then perhaps even there I might insist upon some changes.’

  I was growing tired of being used as his sounding-board.

  ‘When will you start questioning Frere?’ I said.

  ‘As opposed to questioning you, you mean? I intend visiting him later today.’

  ‘Am I permitted to accompany you?’

  ‘Certainly not. My investigation is above all else a confidential one.’

  ‘Then will I be permitted to visit him at other times?’

  ‘I daresay there is little I can do to stop you if your Sergeant Bone is all you say he is.’ He paused and smiled. ‘And if it will save you money, then, yes, you have my permission to visit the prisoner at times other than when he and I are together.’

  I saw, too, how this might later serve his own purpose, but I was powerless to suggest it to him. If a trap had been set for me, then I had helped him to place it, and once in it I could not be seen to struggle to release myself.

  ‘That boy,’ he said.

  ‘Boy?’

  ‘The humpback I encountered at your door.’

  ‘He brought my water.’

  ‘He slept there all night. I have encountered him before. Downriver. He was in a boat with an old man. He warned my porters away from the path they were intent on following. Said there had been some fighting and that an ambush might be laid for us. I suspected him of setting one of his own, wretched creature that he is. I made them quiz him on the path he intended us to follow.’

  ‘And did you follow it?’

  ‘I had already decided on it before he appeared. I thought at first, seeing him come towards us, that he was an ape.’ He laughed. ‘I was within a minute of shooting him, I swear I—’

  ‘But he gave you good advice, it seems.’

  ‘I do not need advice from the likes of him.’ He was aware by then, in this further clumsy attempt to ingratiate himself, of having stepped over the divide between us.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  He rose at this and carefully set down his cup and saucer. ‘There is nothing you cannot ask me,’ he said. ‘You, any of you. Anything you wish to know. It is as much a part of my duty here to appraise you of the wider circumstances within which we all find ourselves as it is to determine the facts of the matter relating to Frere.’

  I went to the door with him and saw him out, trying to understand what he had hoped to achieve by this encounter, whether the balance of understanding and revelation had swung in his favour or our own.

  I watched him as he walked away from me, as though even by this something might be revealed to me. He was a fastidious and a conscientious man; this much had become clear to us. But his methods and intentions were not yet fully revealed, and nor did we fully understand our own lesser roles in the drama he was there to conduct.

  He paused at a kuka tree and snapped off several of its lilies, arranging them in his hand as he continued walking.

  The boy sat at the centre of the compound, leaning back on his hands so that he might lift his head high enough on his curved spine to look directly at us.

  Nash walked to within a few feet of him, looked down at him and then altered his course away from him. The boy watched him go, after which he rose awkwardly from where he sat and half-walked, half-ran towards the river. To me, too, he looked like an ape, running in fright, clumsy and vulnerable, out of the safety of the trees.

  * * *

  The onset of the rain brought everyone inside. I was standing with Cornelius and Abbot in one of our empty warehouses. The last ball of a consignment of old and degraded rubber had just been removed from the building, and the rain doused the fire upon which the rest of the stock had already been burned. The market was over-supplied, and only rubber of the highest quality now fetched a worthwhile price.

  Most men ran in the direction of the garrison or compound. There was nothing in the warehouse to keep them busy or entertained until the rain stopped. Others ran beyond the open space into the huts and sheds beyond, where their women waited and where drink was sold. Those working on the boats when the rain came crowded beneath their awnings and looked out at us.

  The rain was early. It had been Cornelius’s hope to finish burning the rubber before it came, and before Nash arrived to enquire what was happening. The man had so far spent the day with Frere, his second visit.

  We were discussing this, and Abbot’s fears over the closure of the quarry, when we were joined by Klein, running in from the rain with his jacket over his head, followed a moment later by Perpetua and Felicity. The women walked rather than ran and kept their hands clasped together at their waists, the flame of their conviction protected from the downpour at all costs.

  Only then, watching the women, did it occur to me that they had been christened by Klein after the two saints mauled to death by wild beasts. I could only guess at the priest’s sour purpose in doing this.

  Klein stood in the doorway and cursed. A puddle quickly formed at his feet. It was clear by his unguarded language that he was unaware of our presence in the gloom of the building.

  Cornelius had gone to the warehouse to supervise the removal of the rubber, Abbot to estimate the loss to us.

  Perpetua and Felicity were the first to see us. Neither woman spoke or otherwise acknowledged us in the presence of Klein, but both stood facing us until he eventually noticed this and he too turned.

  There was no avoiding the man in the Station. The crowds of worshippers at his sermons grew ever larger. He taunted and threatened them with notions beyond their understanding, and most evenings were now filled with his execrable hymns, the words of which were surely sung with little understanding of what they meant.

  It was common knowledge that Nash had already attended several of these services, and that he and Klein had been seen talking in the brightly lit doorway of the tin chapel. />
  Klein spent a great deal of time across the river. He was negotiating with the Belgians to build a permanent mission to replace the one he had abandoned at Kirasi. It alarmed Cornelius to hear that this was now in prospect, and he had talked to me of the impossibility of locating and exhuming his daughter’s body and reburying it somewhere closer. It was beyond me to ask him what he had done so far other than make his infrequent visits to the place.

  Whenever possible, he still avoided Klein, and on the few occasions he had encountered Perpetua and Felicity without the priest, he had not spoken to them about the man. They knew little of what was happening across the river. Klein told them nothing. They too were distressed by the possibility that Kirasi might now be abandoned, but neither had taken their worries to Klein for fear of being punished by him for interfering in his work.

  ‘Ah, gentlemen,’ Klein said, coming towards us. He squeezed the water from his sleeves. Piles of rotted rubber lay strewn across the warehouse floor, and he considered these as he came, careful not to touch any of them, as though they were dung and he was crossing a meadow.

  ‘Cornelius, Mr van Klees,’ he said. ‘Such a waste.’

  ‘The Company will survive,’ Cornelius said.

  ‘I daresay. But all these small losses must surely add up, and someone, no doubt, will be held accountable for them.’

  ‘We are all accountable, Klein.’

  ‘You’ll get no argument from me on that score, my friend.’

  I saw Cornelius flinch at the word.

  Then Klein turned and called for the two women to join him.

  They came to us, their faces slick with water. Klein motioned to them and they unclasped their hands and held them out. Rain dripped from each of their splayed fingers.

  ‘I swear they would not have the sense to run inside and protect themselves were I not to instruct them,’ Klein said.

  The two women stood close to each other, and it was again clear to us that they would not address us directly, that they would not even speak to each other, unless instructed by Klein.

  ‘I’m surprised you’re still with us,’ Abbot said to Klein. He objected to the supplies we were obliged to give the man under the terms of his lease on the chapel.

  ‘Oh, the Lord’s word is wherever I choose to find it, Mr Abbot. Just as yours is. Seek and ye shall find.’ He laughed at the remark. He had gained weight during his time at the Station. Word among his congregation was that he was being wined and dined by our competitors so that he might erect his new mission on their side of the river and thereby make it a more attractive place of employment for their own, ever-growing, God-fearing workforce. It was doubtless a tale started by Klein himself, who seemed no closer to securing permission or funding for the place no matter how many times he visited.

  On one occasion recently he had been rumoured to have returned late at night drunk, unable to disembark from the boat that carried him without falling into the mud of the bank and then being unable to rise again. The boatman had sent for Perpetua and Felicity, and the two women had sat with Klein and tended to him until dawn, when others of his flock had arrived and carried him to his bed without anyone else having seen him.

  ‘Will you abandon Kirasi completely?’ Cornelius asked him. I saw what an effort this was for him.

  ‘Perhaps. The place is falling down anyway. Any new Jerusalem needs to be built here, on the river, closer to the affairs and the hearts of men.’

  ‘Jerusalem,’ Cornelius repeated softly.

  ‘Are you concerned for your bastard child’s grave? You surprise me, Mr van Klees, you truly do. Leave the child be; she’s where she belongs. It was a short and unhappy existence, nothing more. Why do you insist on turning it into the stick with which to constantly beat yourself?’

  ‘It was a simple question,’ Cornelius said. He signalled to me to reassure me that he would not rise to the man’s goading.

  ‘Ah, is that all it was,’ Klein said. ‘Then there is nothing I can tell you.’ He paused and looked directly at Cornelius. ‘Your woman, on the other hand, were you to ask me about that so-called “wife” you once professed to have, then perhaps I might have been able to tell you something more enlightening.’

  I saw the alarm come into Cornelius’s eyes, like a sudden flash of passing light reflected there.

  ‘He knows nothing,’ I said to him.

  ‘Oh?’ Klein said. ‘Then ask Perpetua here. Ask her if she didn’t only a week ago encounter a group of those poor unfortunate women from Port Elys on their way to the colony at Ososo, all degraded and worn out and cast away from the place. Ask her. Or perhaps you believe she too will only lie to you.’ He fluttered his hands as though to suggest disinterest, and then he nodded at Perpetua to speak.

  ‘I saw them,’ she said. She spoke directly to Cornelius.

  Port Elys was renowned for its brothels, for the women it attracted when there was nowhere else left for them to go. It was where, all those years ago, Klein had sent the mother of Cornelius’s child. Ososo was the largest leper colony on the river.

  ‘Was Evangeline among them?’

  ‘Ha! Evangeline,’ Klein said.

  ‘That was her name.’

  ‘It was what you called her, van Klees, nothing more. And you called her it because it felt better to you that way, because it was better than calling her what she was.’

  Cornelius kept his eyes on Perpetua as Klein spoke.

  The woman shook her head.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘There was another woman there, a woman suffering greatly, who asked me if you were still here. She said she had long ago met Evangeline, and that she had asked after you. She had asked this woman to find out if you were still here.’

  ‘If you still existed to haunt her as you once existed to blight her life,’ Klein shouted.

  ‘If you were still here,’ Perpetua repeated.

  ‘Did you tell her I was?’ Cornelius asked her.

  ‘Of course she did. The truth is air, light and warmth to these women.’

  Klein grabbed Perpetua by the arm and pulled her back to him. ‘Tell him what you told her.’

  ‘I told her that you were still here, that the woman’s child still lay at Kirasi, and that you still visited there.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Cornelius said.

  ‘Thank you for what?’ Klein said. ‘She told it all to a woman on her way to Ososo. Do you imagine she was going to be cured there and return to resume her calling at Port Elys, meet this wife of yours and tell her the good news? How long do you think they last at Ososo? What, six months, twelve? That’s it, my friend – your small and flimsy piece of news has been extinguished.’

  Cornelius continued to look at Perpetua. Her eyes averted from Klein seemed to deny what he said and I saw what slender hope Cornelius took from this.

  ‘How long is it?’ Klein said, diverting Cornelius from the woman.

  ‘Nine years,’ Cornelius said.

  ‘Nine years in Port Elys on her back. How do you imagine a woman can live for so long like that? Or perhaps the passing years are of no consequence to her, not now, not now that she is damned to an eternity of suffering. Perhaps it is only that knowledge which allows her to live with herself and what she has become.’ He paused, hoping for some response from Cornelius, and when none came, he went on: ‘And never forget this, van Klees, she is there because of her liaison with you, you, and for no other reason. You blame me for sending her, for banishing her, but she knew as well as I did, as you did then and do still, that there was no other road open to her. You think the death of her sickly child, your so-called daughter, upset the balance of her mind, but that is only another excuse you make for youself so that you might live with the consequences of your actions.’

  I hoped Perpetua might say something more to give Cornelius hope or to divert Klein’s provocations from him, even at risk to herself, but she said nothing. I regretted that she had not trusted Cornelius sufficiently to visit him privately with the
news, instead of first giving it to Klein to sharpen to this point.

  Abbot, who had so far remained silent, said that he thought Cornelius and Klein were behaving disgracefully. Neither man acknowledged him.

  Klein pushed Perpetua back to where Felicity waited, her part played.

  I began to wonder if her story hadn’t been an elaborate lie, one she had been forced into telling by Klein to further antagonize Cornelius.

  The rain, which streamed into the building all around us, gradually slowed and then ceased. Men reappeared in the compound outside and resumed their work on the boats. The mound of blackened debris stood like a small black pyramid at the centre of the yard. Cornelius had ordered the balls of rubber to be destroyed out of sight of the compound, but the men entrusted to this had halved their effort by building the fire where its remains now stood.

  Klein left us, beckoning Perpetua and Felicity to him as he went.

  Abbot, embarrassed to be left alone with Cornelius and myself after what had happened, made a further cold remark about how Cornelius had behaved, and he too went back outside, waiting only until Klein and the women had gone from view before stepping out into the mud.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked Cornelius.

  ‘Her name is Evangeline,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ I told him.

  He looked out beyond the flooded compound and the river, a look so hard that he might have believed that if he held the gaze for long enough he would have seen the lost and distant woman looking back at him.

  There was nothing more I could say to him, nothing that might reassure or calm him, and certainly nothing that would not now force him to further expose and uselessly re-examine his grief.

  I left him where he stood and went to examine the sodden mound of the fire.

  21

  The following four mornings, Nash rose before any of us and began his interrogation of Frere. We were again told to stay away from the garrison and the gaol while this took place. Even though allowed otherwise, I made no attempt to visit Frere as Nash began his assault upon him.